Month: December 2019

*** Please note, since releasing this blog I optimised the solution to calculate working days to make it more accurate, you can read more in this blog post ***

I’ve been working on a Flow recently that requires either the total amount of days between two dates, or the amount of working days (i.e. total days minus weekends and holidays), and the lack of a proper DateDiff expression in Power Automate has been a bit of a headache for me to work around.

If you’ve ever worked with Excel then you’ll know that the networkdays formula would be perfect for this scenario, so I wanted to see if I could replicate this in a Flow.

The Setup

The networkdays formula takes three parameters:

1. Start Date
2. End Date
3. Holidays (an array containing a list of holiday dates)

We need to include the same parameters in our Flow, so you’ll need to ensure that your trigger contains this information, or that you can gather it within your Flow.

The Solution

The Flow that I created is below, and I’ll go through each step in turn to explain what I’ve done

1. Trigger – For this Flow I’m using a manual trigger that takes the three parameters I outlined above. Of course you could also get this to work from a CDS record or any other trigger. The Holidays are required to be input in a “yyyy-MM-dd” format, separated by a comma. I’ve also experimented with retrieving the holidays from the Gov.UK Bank Holidays API, the important thing is to be able to construct an array of Holiday days.

2. Initialize HolidaysArray – The first action is to take the comma-separated list of Holidays from the trigger and convert it to an array so we can use it later in the Flow. We do this using the Split expression; this will convert a comma-separated list such as 2019-12-25,2019-12-26,2020-01-01,2020-01-02,2020-04-10 into an array that looks like:

[
"2019-12-25",
"2019-12-26",
"2020-01-01",
"2020-01-02",
"2020-04-10"
]

3. Compose StartDateTicks – in Excel dates are stored as sequential serial numbers starting with 1 for January 1 1900. Unfortunately, Power Automate doesn’t do the same thing, so we need to be slightly more creative in order to calculate the number of whole days between two dates; the ticks function gives the nanosecond interval for a specified datetime. For example, the date 10 December 2019 has a tick value of 637115328000000000. We use the compose action to convert the input start date to it’s representative tick value

4. Compose EndDateTicks – as above, use another Compose action to convert the input end date to it’s representative tick value

5. Initialize FullDays integer Variable – Now that we have the tick values for the start date and the end date, we can subtract the start date from the end date then divide the result 864000000000 to convert the result to the number of days. We also add 1 to this result to give us the total number of whole days between the start date and end date, inclusive of the end date. The expression we use is

add(div(sub(outputs('EndDateTicks'),outputs('StartDateTicks')),864000000000),1)

Note: The next 7 steps in the Flow (Step 6 – Step 12) will help us to calculate the number of working days in the total number of days we had returned above.

6. Initialize WorkDays Integer Variable – now that we have the Full Days calculated, we’ll initialize another Integer Variable to calculate the Working Days. When we initialize it we’ll set the default value to the FullDays value and we’ll decrement it in subsequent steps

7. Decrement WorkDays by 2 for each Full Week – we know that in any given 7 day period there will be two weekend days, so we need to remove these from the total number of days returned above. The way we do this is to divide the total number of days value by 7, then multiply it by 2, and then subtract this result from the total number of days.

For example, if you had 14 days total, then you could divide this by 7 (giving 2), then multiply it by 2 (giving 4), and subtract this from 14 (giving 10). This tells you that in a 14 day period there are 10 working days and 4 weekend days. The expression we use to calculate this is:

mul(div(variables('Days'),7),2))

8. Decrement WorkDays by 1 if Start and End are the same day on a weekend – we need to account for situations in which the Start Day and End Day are the same day of the week (i.e. it starts and ends on Sunday). If it is midweek then we don’t need to do anything, but if it’s a weekend then we need to ensure we’re decrementing the WorkDays value by 1. The reason for this is that if we started and finished on a Sunday, this would be 8 days in total. The calculation at step 7 would remove 2 days for each full week, but we’d also need to ensure we’re removing an additional 1 day to account for the weekend.

if(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1'])),if(or(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),0),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),6)),1,0),0)

9. Decrement WorkDays by 2 if Start Sat & End Midweek – in this step we’re checking if the time period we’ve selected for the Flow starts on a Saturday and ends on a midweek day. If so, we want to decrement the WorkDays variable by 2

if(and(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),6),not(or(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),0),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),6)))),2,0)

10. Decrement WorkDays by 1 if Start Sun & End Midweek – this step is almost the exact same as above, but this time we’re checking if the time period starts on a Sunday and ends on a midweek day. If so, we want to Decrement the WorkDays variable by 1

if(and(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),0),not(or(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),0),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),6)))),1,0)

11. Decrement WorkDays by 1 if Start Midweek & End Sat – this action is the inverse of Step 9; we’re checking to see if the time period selected starts on a midweek day and ends on a Saturday. If so, we want to Decrement the WorkDays variable by 1

if(and(not(or(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),0),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),6))),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),6)),1,0)

12. Decrement WorkDays by 2 if Start Midweek & End Sun – as above, this is the inverse of Step 10; we’re checking to see if the time period selected starts on a midweek day and ends on a Sunday. If so, we want to Decrement the WorkDays variable by 2

if(and(not(or(equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),0),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date']),6))),equals(dayofweek(triggerBody()['date_1']),0)),2,0)

NOTE: it would probably make more sense to have the decrement actions above contained within a Switch action to make your Flow more efficient

13. Initialize HolidaystoRemove – for this step we’re initializing another integer variable that we’ll use in the Condition in Step 14 to count the number of Holidays that occur in the selected time period

14. Check if the Date Range contains any of the holidays – for this step we’re going to iterate through the Holidays array we created in step 2 and check if that date is in between the Start Date and End Date of the time period we selected, using an “is greater than or equal to” and “is less than or equal to” condition respectively. If the holiday is in the time period, we’ll increment the HolidaystoRemove variable by 1.

15. Decrement WorkDays by HolidaystoRemove – Once we’ve iterated through all the holidays, we then Decement the WorkDays variable by the HolidaystoRemove variable, and this will give us our final amount of Working Days in our selected Time Period

16. Response – the final step in my Flow is a Response action. I’m going to be calling this Flow as a child flow from another one, so I need the response to return the information. In my response I have 3 outputs:

1. Total Days
2. Working Days
3. Holidays Removed

Conclusions

This Flow was a bit more frustrating than I’d expected to try and pull together, and it involves some hefty expressions, but I’ve tested it pretty thoroughly and its worked in all the scenarios I’ve thrown at it, but I’d love for other people to do more testing.

I would love to get your feedback on whether you think this is useful, or if you think I’ve missed anything or made any mistakes!

If you’d like to download a copy of this Flow please click here

Recently, my good friend Megan Walker did a guest post for ClickDimensions showing how to create a Lead for every ClickDimensions Posted Form and if you haven’t read it then you really should!

When I was reading this post one of the things I noticed was the requirement to use a Filter Array step and Compose step for each question in your Form in order to be able to use them when you created the Lead. This approach works perfectly, but it could be quite time consuming to create if your Form has lots of questions, so I wondered if there could be a way to simplify it a little bit.

Please note, for the purposes of this post I’m only going to be focusing on an alternative way to get the Posted Field data and use it to create your Lead, Megan has covered everything else in her post so please read it!

If you’d prefer to watch a video overview of this blog, click here.

The Solution

The first step is still to List your Posted Fields using the List Records action. If you’re using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector then you’ll be able to select the specific attributes you want returned. In this case we’re only interested in the Label (i.e. the Question) and the Value (i.e. the Answer). You should also set the Order By to the Label; this will ensure consistency in the returned results which is important for later steps in the Flow.

If you look at the Output for the List Records action, you’ll see that it gives a JSON array that looks something like:

We want to make matching pairs for the Questions (Labels) and Answers (Values) from each of the returned Posted Fields and combine them in an array. Fortunately for us, in Power Automate there is an Action called Select that allows you to “Select the specified properties from all elements of the ‘From’ array into a new array”. This is really just a fancy way of saying you can take the elements of the output above that you like and keep them, while disregarding the rest, and you can reshape them into pairs as required.

For the Select action, we take the data From the output of the List Records step, and then we create a map of the Label and the Value as a name pair

When this is done, the output from the Select action will look something like this:

This is much better!

As you can see, the Questions and Answers have been combined into array elements. You can also see that, as we set the Order By to the Label in the List Records Step above, the array elements are listed alphabetically. One important thing to note at this stage is that each element in an Array has an index number beginning from 0, so you can identify the array elements I’ve returned above as follows

The final step for creating the Lead is to add a Create a New Record action, and then we’re going to use an expression to pull the values from the output above into the fields we need to populate:

As you can see, for each field we are populating we have an expression with the following format:

@{outputs('Select')['body']?[0]?['Company Name']}

The key things to note in the construction of this expression are:

1. for the Outputs expression, the name ‘Select’ must match the name that you’ve given to the Select step
2. the Integer number [0] must match the element number for the array element as indicated above. For example, if we want to set the Telephone Number we will use [4]
3. The final part of the expression [‘Company Name’] must match the text of the Question from the array.

If we wanted to get the Email Address instead of the Company Name then the expression would be:

@{outputs('Select')['body']?[5]?['Work Email Address']}

After we’ve completed all of the above our flow now only has three actions to retrieve Posted Fields and to create a Lead with the answers submitted:

Conclusions

The first thing to say is that none of this would have been possible without the valuable insights of Megan Walker and Rob Dawson. I keep saying this, but one of my favourite things about this community is the collaborative efforts we all make to help each other.

The second thing is that while this works, if the Questions on your form were to change, either by adding/removing questions or by changing the Label of the questions then this would probably affect the success of the Flow, so it might be worth putting some additional validation logic in to catch any potential issues like that.

The final thing is that Power Automate is so powerful and it’s amazing what you can achieve with some lateral thinking. This has been a fun little challenge for me, and hopefully you find it useful. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.